cooling
stoat | September 4, 2011Those with long memories will note that this is a re-post of this from my old blog. I've hoicked it over here because I read Stratospheric Cooling, April 18, 2010, by scienceofdoom who says "Why Is the Stratosphere Expected to Cool from Increases in "Greenhouse" Gases? This is a difficult one to answer with a 30-second soundbite". But I think he is wrong. Now read on.
One of the strongest predictions of global warming is that the stratosphere will cool - unlike the troposphere, which will warm, of course. See the IPCC here for example. This turns out to be not as useful for detecting climate…
sastyk | July 21, 2011As most of the country slowly roasts in one of the worst heat waves so far, I thought it was worth reminding people that one can stay safe in the heat, even without air conditioning. This is important now for the millions of people who don't own air conditioners, who don't want the environmental impact of an air conditioner, or who find themselves for various reasons, without power in the hot weather. As we all know, this is peak season for brown and blackouts.
There are a lot of parallels between dealing with extreme heat and extreme cold in a difficult situation. The first and most…
sastyk | March 17, 2011It can be hard to sort out exactly what's happening in Japan right now, or what the status of the nuclear situation is. Euan Mearns has done everyone a great service in pulling together a summary of known and unknown and credible, intelligent speculation, while clearly indicating which is which. It is well worth a read. Consider this useful analysis by Joules Burn, quoted in the piece:
Since residual weld stresses and tensile stress in piping, valves, control tubing, etc are always present, Standard Operating Reactor water quality standards require keeping chlorides at parts per billion…
drorzel | August 16, 2010Last week's series of posts on the hardware needed for laser cooling and trapping experiments dealt specifically with laser-cooling type experiments. It's possible, though, to make cold atoms without using laser cooling, using a number of techniques I described in two posts back in January. Those didn't go into the hardware required, though, so what's different about those techniques in terms of the gear?
Less than you might think. In fact, most of the labs that do these experiments use exactly the same sorts of equipment that laser coolers do. Including some lasers.
It's not all of them, but…
stoat | January 11, 2010The malign Nature effect, again refers.
In the hotly contested competition to see who are the biggest tossers in the british newspaper industry there has been an early entry this year by the Daily Mail: The mini ice age starts here based mainly on the fact that, oh, it has snowed a bit. And not helped by the UKMO pratting around with seasonal forecasts they know full well are worthless to the general public. Whether or not this makes the Mail more stupid that the Torygraph I leave for you to judge (incidentally, for you Johnny Foreigners lucky enough not to know what the Mail is, its a…